Bear Grease - Ep. 82: Secret Agent Man - Instinct (Part 3)

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

This is the third and final episode of our Secret Agent Man series with undercover Ohio Wildlife agent RT Stewart. In part one we learned about the big picture mechanics of undercover stings and how RT was a pioneer in the early 1990s for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. We learned that humans don’t do well with chronic stress and discussed the personal toll placed on undercover agents and their families because of it, On this third episode we’re going to hear about some close calls where RT was almost found out and explore the idea of human instinct, having a sixth sense, and how that compares with pure wit. Many believe decision making is purely based on observable data, but it sounds like some many subconscious decision making mechanisms are wired into our DNA. We'll hear again from Dr. Matthew Sharps of the University of California in Fresno and author, Chip Gross.  In this final episode of the series, we'll explore some of RT’s best stories of how he handled trouble, and how he used an uncanny wit and intuition to de-escalate situations. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Well, yeah, the first day I ever met him. That's what my buddy said that he was a game warden. And I'm thinking, yeah. He said, yeah, that guys go right in and live with them.

You know what I'm thinking. Yeah, that's what we do. Wow. We're on our third and final episode of our Secret Agent Man series with Undercover Ohio Wildlife Agent R.T. Stewart. On part one, we learned about the big picture mechanics of undercover stings, and how RT was a pioneer in the early 1990s for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. We learned that humans don't do well with chronic stress and discussed the personal toll placed on undercover agents and their families because of it.

And in a comactic moment, I asked RT a cutting question. Was it worth it? You're too good. No. No. If I look back at it, if I had to do it over again and I knew what I knew right now, I'd say no. But at the time is the only thing I knew and the only thing I wanted to do.

On the second episode, RT told us about his biggest sting, Operation Redbud, where 26 men were convicted of over 275 wildlife crimes. They were taken by total surprise. I think we ended up dressed in 26 that day. 26 people. That's a major operation. And at that particular time, it was the largest turkey poised. coaching ring in a country.

And on this third episode, we're going to hear about some close calls where RT was almost found out and explore the idea of human instinct or having a sixth sense or a premonition. But also how that compares with just pure wit, many believe decision making is purely based on observable data. But it sounds like some of our subconscious decision-making mechanisms are hardwired into our DNA. We're going to hear about that from Dr. Matthew Sharps from the University of California and Fresno. So we're going to explore some of RT's best stories of how he handled trouble and how he used this uncanny wit and intuition to de-escalate situations. I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one. R.T. is calling a bird, and the other officer just happens to let it slip out good calling R.T. So within a few seconds, he comes back, yeah, that's why they call me real turkey, R.T.

Just that quick. He smoothed it over so quickly and so well that there was no question. And he did that time after time after time. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten. but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. The RT's working undercover at Lake Erie and the two main fish up there that people are poaching as walleyes and yellow perch.

So people are coming to RT. They're selling him illegal wall eyes, illegal perch. And at one point, again, one of the bad guys accuses him of being a wildlife officer. And he's got to somehow get out of it and prove that he's not. So at that time, and he wore a white cowboy hat a lot, especially when he gets dressed up, which I think is very symbolic. You know, the guy with the white cowboy hat is a good guy. Good guy.

But that particular day, he had a wire under his cowboy hat. Okay? So he's recording this conversation. And so now he's got to put on a front that he's not the wildlife officer. So he accuses the other guy of being one. Oh. And he says, you're the wildlife officer. Yeah.

He said, and I'll prove it. Let's strip down and we'll see who's wearing a wire. Who's not? So he strips down to his underwear and demands. party or something, right? There's other people watching. And he demands the other guy do the same thing. They both look at each other. They both don't see a wire. And they go back to being buddies and drinking beer. The only catch is R.T. had the wire in his cowboy hat, which he never took off. That's a great story. That is a great story. So that's the

types of things that when I talk about how he could react so quickly, very, very few people can do that. He did an absolutely great job. That was author Chip Gross. He wrote the book about R.T. Stewart's career called Poachers Were My Pray. Aside from cruising around in the

poach coach, his 4x4 undercover van equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, during RT's time undercover, he was a master at thinking on his feet and appearing to keep his cool under pressure. However, just under the

surface was the constant stress of being found out by the bad guys, causing RT to live in a constant state of fight or flight. Human response to stress in unusual situations is interesting to analyze, because it's during these times that the veneers of our personality, or any cheap socially accepted front we put on or cleared away, and we see what's really inside of us. I often find myself disappointed when the outer layer of this human-shaped puppet I live inside of is stripped off. Often, I overcalculate my abilities to respond to stress. However, when the systems are overridden and we flow on autopilot, amazing things can happen.

Sometimes it's incredible. Humans have been tromping around and getting themselves into pickles for so long. I wonder if we have mechanisms at the DNA level helping us. We've all heard about humans having a sixth sense, but is that even real? I need to find out, and like I've said so many times before, I'm interested in things that control us that we're completely unaware of. Here's Dr. Matthew Sharps of the University of California, Fresno. He's analyzing RT's stripping off his clothes at a party and demanding that the bad guy do the same. Dr. Sharps is going to talk to us about script violations.

That's really brilliant, yeah, because when you're suddenly surprised like that, you go immediately into a very high level of fight or flight. And that means a lot of the blood resources you'd have for your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain you actually think, the part of the brain that involved the cognitive flexibility. Suddenly you don't have that. So what are you going to do? A lot of people suddenly start stammering and go,

I'm not one, maybe you're one, I'm not one, and suddenly they've had it. But that idea of shifting it into not only the rage, like my friend in the anti-drug world, but into something very surprising. This you might be interested in. Human beings often out, in fact, pretty much on automatic. You know, if I pick up a coffee cup I'm doing it right now, it's not something that I'm thinking about. I just do it. But you have what we call a script, the automated sequences of behaviors.

Now, if we say, okay, fair enough, here's a guy who does it, somebody who does it the other way. He has breakfast before he gets up every day. Is he rich or poor? Everybody knows, hey, he's rich. Butler brings it to him, right? Okay, here's a guy who had breakfast before he got up today, but only today, okay? Is he sick or well? Everybody goes sick.

Now, nobody's been asked those questions before, but we all know them because of the automatic scripts that we deal with in our world. So what the challenge did was just brilliant, okay? Because suddenly when you're challenged like that, stripping off all your clothes and demanding that everybody else does too, that's a huge script violation. It's a script interruption. You turn the tables. The bad guys don't know what to do with you then. This sounds like a superpower.

Being able to scramble the bad guys' social scripts so they don't know what to do with you. Who knew the bad guys were such delicate social flowers? Social scripts are so deeply ingrained in us that we don't even recognize we abide by them until someone breaks one. The script change can be so destabilizing that it reroutes the focus of the moment. You might try this in a benign situation.

When someone confront you on something, do something surprising, and put a subtle question that demands a response back from them. Don't be a jerk or be deceitful, but sometimes people want something from you that you can't give them and you need a way out. It's worth a shot. Our fighter flight responses, they'll often, not consciously calculated are usually connected back to our training, whether formal or informal. After interviewing RT and seeing how many dangerous situations he was in, I wondered if he was ever

in any physical altercations, like fistfights. So that's exactly what I asked him. RT in this next section is going to refer to an article that was written by Chip Gross in the mid-1990s about Ohio's new undercover wildlife department. On episode one, Chip told how the bad guys showed RT the actual magazine article when he was undercover. Got him in some trouble. Here's RT. Did you ever get in a fist fight or any kind of physical altercation just in the rough life

that you had to live? I realize your cover never got busted. Never got busted. But did you ever? I had it a couple times where they were here. they suspect. As a matter of fact, that letter that

the article about undercover agents. Yeah. Brought it up. He said, well, yeah, the first day I ever met him. That's what my buddy said

that he was a game warden. Really? Mm-hmm. And I'm thinking, yeah. I don't even like to be called that anymore. You know,

they never did bring it back up. But, you know, I felt I had enough confidence I could say that to them. Yeah. He said, yeah,

that guys go right in and live with them. You know, and I'm thinking, yeah, that's what we do. Wow. But did I ever get in any?

Now, would I have? If I had to, absolutely. I wasn't afraid to fight. I was fairly good shape. It was fairly good size, so I didn't get picked on too much. I had been confronted a few times, but I was always talking the way out of it. Yeah. And I'll give you one example, was he was drunk drinking, and I was there, and he apparently didn't like me or whatever.

He said, I believe I can take you. I said, you're pretty good size. I believe I can take you. I said, you think? He goes, yep, I'm going to try you for the night's over. You know, I'm thinking, oh, boy, here we go. And I just said, I'll tell you what, buddy. I guarantee you'll probably win.

But you'll know you've been in the fight. He never said that one. Those words just de-escalated the situation. And you were kind of a master at that. I didn't know it was at the time, but I look back at it now. And I think, yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty quick. Because there's a hundred different things that you could have said.

It would have escalated that. Yeah. And that gave him an out. Yeah. You gave him some honor. Yeah. You were like, you were like, you probably would beat me. Yep.

But you didn't. But you're going to know you're going to know you're in a fight. Yeah. So it let him know that, yeah, I'm going to use that sometime. I'm glad I'll get that. Yeah. Yeah. And it worked.

It worked. It gives them an out, you know, because, you know, would he have won? Probably not. You probably would have taken. A wise dude named Saul. Solomon, said to be one of the wisest men of the ancient world once said, A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. One version of the quote says,

A gentle answer deflex anger, but harsh words make tempers flare. This is exactly what RT did, and he threw in a little extra so he didn't sound so much like a sissy. R.T. however, was pretty sure he would have won that. the fight and here's why he had so much confidence. Let's just say he was experienced. I remember when they interviewed me, they said, to take this job. I had a little experience in that fighting when they did my background investigation. They said, also I found out you like to fight. I said, no, now you got me mixed up with my brothers, which they was big into fighting.

He said, all right, said, how many fights you've been, and keep in mind, I was 35. He said, how many fights you've been into in your lifetime? Now, my lifetime, I'm thinking school yachts, you know. Yeah. And I said, I don't know, maybe 40. Like fist fights. Fist fights. Like real, real fist fight.

Not joking around. No, 50. 40. Okay. I didn't think nothing of it. You were like, man, I'm the, I'm the gentle one of the brothers. I was. I was.

My brothers ain't go to town just to fight, you know. But, I mean, seriously, my brothers were spanish. about it. And that's when I said you got me mixed up with my brothers. And when I told him 40 and I went home and told my girlfriend at that time, I told her about the interview and so forth. She said, 40? I said, oh, yeah. Did you got any idea how many men go through life and never been in a fight in their life? I just thought that was natural. You thought that was normal. Yeah. Well, I can tell you, that's not normal. Well, I discovered that after the fact. Yeah, I can tell you, that's, that is not So I wasn't a rookie at it.

Yeah. That's probably to what gave you some confidence. I mean, and not that physical strength is going to really be what somebody would need, but you knew you could take care of yourself. And it goes back to originally what you told me that you had to be self-sufficient. Yeah.

And, you know, you're in the roughest of the rough places with criminals, people plotting to kill other people. I mean, this is like, this is the criminal world. That's a criminal world you're living in. and you're supposed to be the criminal. But if they find out who you are, your life is in jeopardy. And I never thought anything about that. I never thought, I just felt that I could take care of myself if I got into a situation.

Yeah. I remember Chip asked me one time, did you carry a gun? I said, no, I never carried a gun. But I said, he said, well, if somebody had done and pulled a gun on you, I said, well, it depended on the circumstances. I said, if a man, we're sitting here across the table or in close proximity of that individual, and that man pulled a gun on me, I had turned. trained and was confident enough in myself that I would own that gun.

I had that much confidence in training and weapon takeaway that I would own that. You'd take it from it. I'd take it from me. There was no question in my mind I could take it from it. But now I said, if I walked in a door from here to there and a guy's got a gun on me, I'm what to call it tactically disengaging. I'm going back out the door because they're, you know, he ain't got a win situation. If you're within arms reaches somebody with a gun, I'm taking it.

I'm owning it. And that kind of confidence, and even that you have to this day, is what it would take to be successful in that kind of situation. Yeah. You know, and when I hear you talk like that, I think sometimes about these, like, active shooters that are happening now and how a lot of guys conceal carry and the potential for having to use your concealed carry to remedy a situation. I realize there's so many wild possible things that could happen. But I think most of us that aren't in law enforcement, probably when it came down to it, we'd like to think we could do it, but maybe we'd lack the confidence to be able to. And I had, I'd raised with guns all my life.

I had competed in combat shooting. I was very proficient. And, you know, I can't say what would have happened had I got in a gun battle. It was like combat. You don't know what you're going to do. But I felt in my mom. that I had enough confidence that I could control about any situation. Training builds confidence, and confidence is extremely important in all areas of life.

Research suggests that confident people tend to be healthier and live longer, and it's likely correlated to the effects of the positive emotions associated with confidence, happiness, optimism, and satisfaction. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen.

But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my. cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did,

and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I asked Chip Gross to tell me one of his favorite stories about RT, and I think this one will help us see some of RT's instincts in action, which will lead us to a bigger question. And here's one of the examples from the book. He would play cards two or three times a week with this group of poachers. They're playing cards one night, and you know how conversation goes. Well, there had been a bald eagle shot along the Ohio River.

And the feds were in on the investigation. Of course, the Ohio Division of Wildlife was in on the investigation. Everybody's trying to figure out who shot this eagle. And the bad guys were talking about this and didn't directly say to RT, but they said, you know, I think I know who it is. And they were trying to draw RT out. They're thinking if he's an undercover officer, he's going to want to know who killed this eagle. So they didn't really know who killed the eagle. No, I don't think they did.

They suspected that maybe something was fishy. So they're watching for his reaction. And he wanted to ask in the worst way, okay, who is it? But something told him, some intuition told him, don't say anything. Just keep playing cards and just fluff it off. And that's what he did. So it comes back then a few weeks later from the bad guys that, hey, you remember we were playing cards a couple weeks ago when we were talking about the Eagle? He said, yeah.

He said, you know, we thought maybe we were a game war. We were just testing you that night. That's the kind of instincts he has, okay? And I don't know where it comes from. It's probably a combination of natural ability and just working on the job and knowing when to push for information, when not. But that's the kind of person he is. You can't teach that, can you? I don't think so.

You can't teach that kind of instinct. This brings up an interesting question about the source of what we often call intuition or a six sense or a premonition, basically making a decision based upon data that doesn't exist. Dr. Sharps is about to tell us that some of our instinct is actually hardwired into our DNA. But let me say that even with this information, I absolutely believe in the supernatural, as it pertains to a human's connection to a divine source to get information that can't be found from anything in the earth. Western thinkers often frown on and belittle things that science can't prove. But I think that rationale is hogwash.

Science by its very definition is only geared to explain the physical, observable, and repeatable things in the universe. And the stuff I'm talking about isn't that. But I have personally experienced the delivery of information, impossible for me to have known and disconnected from any other piece of earthly knowledge that came directly from the great creator of this universe, the El Hephe himself. I believe that with all my heart. However, I do believe that some of our intuition, premonition, our six cents, comes from stuff that's deeply hardwired into us.

Because we've been rambling around on this planet for a long time. And to understand where the origin of some of this stuff comes from, we have to look at the very fabric of our DNA. Here's Dr. Sharps with some info on how humans respond, to animal tracks and looking in the eyes of serial killers. Stay with me. Yeah, because he broke his own script there. If you're an investigator,

and the bad guys drop something like that in your lap, there's a tendency to, maybe he's circumventive it, but you want to find that up. It's amazing how much behavior is under the surface that we don't even know about the baby, but I did a paper some years or 20 years ago. I got interested in the psychology of hunting, and so I started asking myself,

Okay, what's the most complicated thing hunters do? What would you expect to have hardwired into the brain? The most complicated part of Hutton is tracking. So would it help in the ancient world to have animal tracks, though, in your head? Would it help to have a sort of be born with an encyclopedia of animal tracks? No, it wouldn't because Saberton tigers no longer exist. Mammoths no longer exist to be worthless. What you'd need is the ability to learn animal tracks.

Well, I get urban college students that, in general, no experience, interest, or understanding of animals, hunting, tracking, or even being outside. They still learned animal tracks three times better and faster than other equally unfamiliar stimuli. Human beings are geared to learn some of the scripts of hunting. We did another one, another study, is not so much geared to hunting, but serial killers, you want to avoid them until you invent cops, okay?

All we did was show the eyes from the eyebrow to the top of the cheekbones of serial killers and non-serial killers to people. They didn't recognize them with serial killers, but they didn't like them. They didn't trust them. They didn't want to work with them. Just by looking on the eyes. Just all these oddball automatic things. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I've published that both as a research paper and in my blog, The Forensic View. There's all these automated things in us that we expect other people to behave in a certain way. We expect that if we behave in a certain way, the other people will treat us in the way we want. And in the undercover role, much of that is completely reversed. It feels like there's a whole bunch of dates. and Intel working inside of us just because we are essentially a highly successful,

and I believe we're much more than animals, I do, but from a scientific perspective, we're a very successful mammal on planet Earth. There's a bunch of stuff that's flowing through us that we don't even understand that we do all the time. And people describe it as like a sixth sense, but maybe it's more mechanical, more explainable than just this kind of mystery of having a six sense. A lot of the stuff is under sort of, you know, it's automated in us. It's not conscious, but we come up with things like that.

Professor, this is how I got interested in the hunting stuff from personal experience, but also from a professor named Gordon Orions. And all he did was measure the distance between people and trees in paintings. And of course, it's pretty much random, right? It's either where the artist wants some or they are where they actually saw. But if it's painting of sunset, Orions found. the artist wants to paint people close to trees. Well, what happened at sunset, aside from it gets dark,

is back in the day the big cats came out. There were prehistoric cats that are extinct now, thank God, that specialized in eating humans or human ancestors. Yeah, today cats are nine inches tall. You call them Mrs. Flufkins, you give them fishies. But back in the day when they were at Sabretooth, yeah, like a lot of big cats can climb better than we are, but a lot of them were heavier than our ancestors.

And you're in no danger now. But you still live, you know, put a painting on the wall, you want the people that tree. the people of trees pretty close together if it's sunset. That was what I didn't discover. That was discovered by Gordon Orions. You know, artists want to sell paintings. People tend to buy paintings of if there is a sunset and there are people in trees

and if they seem to want to have the trees and the people pretty close together. What is what Orients found the painters doing? We've got to rehash the three things that Dr. Sharp said because they're incredibly interesting. He said that humans are geared to learn. some of the scripts of hunting at a DNA level. We're hardwired to be able to identify and remember animal tracks three times better and faster than other unfamiliar shapes. That's mind-blowing.

Secondly, he talked about our ability to know if we can trust someone by just looking at their eyes. This is scientific research proving this stuff. Think about the nuanced differences in people's eyes. How can we possibly discern so much information from a glance? is it the pupils or how wide people open their eyes or how long they maintain eye contact. There are only so many variables of imagery that create the visible look of the eye, but it tells us a lot.

The third thing he talked about was an innate desire to be near cover at sunset. He basically said if you're an artist and are painting humans at sunset on a natural landscape, you better put them near trees if you want to sell that painting. We all subconsciously know a key part of surviving on planet Earth is being near cover once it gets dark. And even in art, we lean towards things that make us feel secure. Now that is fascinating and points back to our hunter-gatherer roots. These three things don't really, though, give us any answers

When we look at a career of somebody like RT Stewart, who had this uncanny instinct to evade bad guys, but it does tell us that the answers are often more complex than we might have thought. So here's another great story of RT getting out of trouble. I count this one to pure wit. Here's Chip. He and another undercover officer, a younger officer, are out hunting turkeys illegally with the bad guy. Okay. So RT is calling a bird, and the other officer just happens to let it slip out good calling RT.

And the bad guy. He was caught in the moment, and he was excited. Good calling RT. And, of course, RT doesn't want to be called that. So within a few seconds, he comes back, yeah, that's why they call me real turkey, RT, just that quick. So did the, just to cover it and smooth it over? Did the bad guy take note of it? Maybe for a few seconds, but yeah, he smoothed it over so quickly and so well that there was no question.

And he did that time after time after time. Just thinking on his feet. He was able to say RT stands for real turkey. Real turkey, yeah. So that's why I'm talking about that's how good he was. And very, very few people can do that. So we were very fortunate in Ohio to have him on our side. He could have been on the other side real easily.

But he was a pioneer in Ohio as to what he did. And many officers have followed in his footsteps since. And I think the undercover unit in Ohio is much in debt for what he did. You may remember from the past episodes, RT was one of the first undercover agents working in Ohio trying to catch wildlife violators. Now some of these tactics are understood and agents are trained to do them. But RT was flowing off pure instinct that came from living a diverse life of working in coal mines, being an outlaw himself in his early life, and just being an authentic rural Southeast Ohio bro. But he also had an intangible thing that can't be taught.

You've just got to be born with it. I want to hear RT tell a story about it. a case that he worked, which we haven't talked about yet. So the guy he's going to talk about is not Target 2, but he's going to talk about a guy that he became pretty good friends with, so much that this guy tried to hook up RT with his sister. And RT knew that this was trouble. And so one night, in the heat of the moment, he found the perfect way to blow up this would-be relationship. But first, he'll tell us a little bit about the suspect. And for all you parents out there, this story is probably a PG-13 story.

Feller, doing another operation, I've become very close to him. And he had children as also, and I always bring him candy and different things. And he would tell me things about their personal life that they probably shouldn't be telling. But we'd become very close. He was a nice guy. He only had an eighth-grade education. I did not take advantage of him. By degrading him, I treated him as a human being.

And during the take, and he called me buddy Bill. My name at that time was Bill Stone. And he borrowed money from you. He'd borrowing money from me. And he always paid you back. That was another thing. I told my boss, he didn't know it was doing this. My boss didn't.

I told him later. I said, hey, we paid his gas bill all winter. He said, what? And I said, yeah, he'd asked me if he borrow money to pay the gas bill. And, you know, he's got kids. And I said, I'd blown him the money. And every weekend, we'd, Whenever his wife would get paid, he'd call me up and say,

Buddy Bill, come down, said, I forget her name. Said she gets paid and we'll pay you. He was good for his word. Good for his word on that. They paid me in. Wasn't no sense to tell my boss at the time. And when he found out you were undercover, what was his response? The guys that took him down, he asked him who it was or whatever,

and he says, they told him, they told him that was Bill. Buddy Bill, and he broke down with third crime. that hurt him that bad. And I felt sad for him or sorry for him. Because he wasn't the number one person I was after. Right. He was just an excuse to get to the number one person. Yeah.

He just happened to get hooked up with me. But yeah, I felt sorry for him. He's having a rough time anyhow, but I had a job to do. You had to do it. Had to do it. All right. You were going to tell me about this lady that propositioned you. It was his sister.

Oh. Said that we've got my sister. I've been telling her all about you and she wants to meet me and they were the ones they were the ones that I let read the compensation papers and stuff on my injury so they thought you had a lot of money oh yeah and he said apparently he'd been talking talking me up to his sister and said man she wants to meet you you'd be perfect match for my sister and I'm going to how do I get out of this I said she'll be in this weekend oh boy we're sitting at a bar and I said no and there's another guy there with us And I said, you know I got hurt in a coal mine. Yeah, yeah. And that was a real part of your story. Yeah, that was a real part of my story. That you'd already told them, you got hurt.

You didn't probably go into detail. No, it didn't go in detail. I told them I got my, which I did, I got covered up in the coal mine, hurt my ribs and my back and my hip. And that actually happened. That actually is a true story. Okay. And, but I didn't tell them rest. How I come up with this, I have no idea.

Making it on your feet, man. Yeah. But I'd know that if I'd have told them. I had an operation in my back or something. And if we're in camp and take my shirt off, there's usually a scar or something. You know, there's usually, you got to have, you kind of think ahead, you know. Yeah. So I'm thinking, how do I get out of this?

I'm sitting there. I said, now, Leonard, I want to tell you something, but everybody don't need to know this. And I said, come here. He gets in there reclose. I'm holding my head down. I said, you know I got hurt in the coal mine. Yeah. I said, but I didn't tell you the whole story.

I said, it's kind of embarrassing. He goes, what, that, Bill? I said, you know, I like to chase women and everything like that, but I said, I can't do nothing. He goes, what? I said, yeah, I lost my nuts. And he goes, what? I said, yeah, it was part of my, and I said, it's very embarrassing, but I said, nobody knows that. So, will you please keep out of secret?

I said, I don't know how I was able to do it, I had tears coming down. Wow. Yeah. Not one time after that did he ever mention his sister. Well, that's a good thing. Right. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

It worked. Wow. It worked. You just came up with that odd spot. I just come up with that right on the spot. It de-escalated the situation. That was what Dr. Sharps would call a script change. and a wild one at that.

It was something that no one was expecting and took the emphasis off of what everyone was focused on. The only reason I knew about RT was through the book, Poachers Were My Pre by Chip Gross. The book is written in the first person, meaning in RT's words, but Chip is the one that wrote it. You can order this book off Amazon,

and it's a fun read that goes into much more detail than we could get into on this podcast. RT tells about his top 10 operations, and all of them are full of excitement and disgust. As you see how criminals sought to take advantage of the system, but you'll also see the fascinating ways in which RT infiltrated these poaching rings. Here's Chip with a few words about the book. We had a fun time doing this book, and I felt privileged that he asked me to do it, and I got to hear all these stories firsthand. And to me, that was super interesting. I mean, super interesting.

And the way we did this, you know, he lived here in southern Ohio. I lived in northern Ohio. We would pretty much each drive about an hour and a half, two hours toward the middle of the state. We'd meet. He'd tell me one of the stories, I'd go back home, I'd write for about two weeks, get it about the way I wanted. I'd call him and say, okay, Artie, let's do another one. We'd do it again.

We probably met probably a dozen times. And that's how the book got. Yeah, that's really well done. In this Secret Agent Man series, we've learned a lot about undercover law enforcement and human nature. We've learned that criminals are fueled by ego. We learned about the social hierarchy of criminal rings. We learned that humans are designed to handle acute or temporary stress, but not long-term chronic stress. We learned that the best liars often stick really close to the truth.

We learned that criminals can be despicable in most areas of their lives. Some of them are. But sometimes they're decent people that are just misguided in certain areas. We also learned how much our game agencies are willing to do to protect wildlife. We also learned that these tactics that were employed pre-internet and pre-social media are completely different than what they're doing today to catch criminals. I think the biggest takeaway from all this is that we need to continue to craft the hunting culture in North America in a way that values obeying the law.

I'm in the field a lot and around a lot of people, and I still see where foolishly the idea of breaking game laws is glamorized, even amongst good people. And that's just plain foolishness. In the end, I'm grateful for law enforcement. in all that they do to protect wildlife and wild places. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Do me a favor by sharing our podcast this week with your buddies, and we'll see you next week on the render.

On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag, and there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence.

Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in dark. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something.

I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.